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Diary of the last ten hours

Saturday 1.35pm

Watching a woman in London rabble-rousing fellow anti-vaxxers and Covid sceptics by invoking Nuremberg and proposing the hanging of NHS doctors and nurses.

It’s possible, I suppose,  she genuinely believes her bullshit. 

It’s possible, I suppose, she really doesn’t grasp the harm she is doing. 

But she is a menace, she is far from the only one, and I’m running short of the understanding we are asked to show to someone who has gone down the rabbit hole. 

Somewhere around hang these doctors and nurses I am feeling a reflex nerve and it goes: I have fucking had it with this brain-addled conspiracist shit, you dimwitted demagogues.

Kate Shemarani is her name, and here's the link.

Her personal brand appears to be the usual lies, jazzed up a bit with big hair and heels, plus of course the Nazi shit. 

Meanwhile in Sydney, several thousand morons are out on the street and one of them is punching a horse in the head, and the only good thing you can say about this is that by Monday morning one of the police bosses will be vowing they won't be letting this stupidity happen again.

This is becoming a beauty pageant of vast cluelessness. Why don’t you all go home and concentrate on your quality research into Ivermectin? 

Swear to god if we could find a way to harness the energy you throw into disproving accepted science in favour of DIY reckons, we would not have to burn one further lump of coal.

This Morning 

6.48am

Wake to the news Dunedin high schooler Erika Fairweather has made the Women’s 400m freestyle final. High five Erika! There’s no telling what may happen at 2.30pm today but wherever you might finish that is one hell of a big deal.

6.49am

Still very excited for this afternoon but for now my highlight of these 2020 Olympics is this clip someone has dug up from 2016 by the room next door man Michael Spicer.

Michael Spicer @MrMichaelSpicer

The Unrehearsed Voiceover Artist - Olympic Synchronised Swimming.

7.22am

Not to detract from the earlier Olympic excitement but they're going on a bit now on the radio and my mind is wandering. Please let me take this moment to give some praise to the newspaper I more often call the Waikato Invader for its reactionary work and say: thank you for running testimony by Gary Dell which lays out a history of the suppression of a culture in the clearest, simplest, and most undeniable of terms.

So the true irony of people claiming Māori has been forced upon them because it's spoken on the TV, added to the national anthem and seen in placenames and used and pronounced correctly a lot more often now, is overlooking the fact that for 100 years English was literally beaten into their fellow New Zealanders at school. Many of them were their schoolmates, it was actually, physically forced upon Māori children for generations.

9.43am

Words come firing out of the mouth of David Seymour like a spray of un-chewed Afghan biscuits, and get reported by people because they have to. But I’m not going to write them out here.

The upshot is he thinks we need to leave Covid behind and get back to business-as-usual because that’s been long enough now thanks, let's put our big boys’ gumboots on and get used to it.

Well, maybe Sparky. But what if given the lack of tight control there will be mutations for which the vaccines will need to be modified or for which we will need new ones, and what if things remain too rough to permit easy movement through borders? And what if masks and some kind of distancing and crowd limits might be here to stay?

Because, you know what? I’d rather it didn’t come to that but if it did, I could live with it. Please see yesterday's column about the whole notion of life dealing you cards you don't want and how you adapt and adjust, because that’s our way, it's always been our way.

And by that I mean adapt to changed circumstances so that we make the best and the most of things.

What I don't mean is: act like nothing has changed.

10.45am

Some New Zealanders build rockets, some achieve Olympic greatness, some grow up and do something well-adjusted and adult. And some slope off to Perth never to be heard of again save for the day they slink into a store and film themselves being a tragic man-boy hiding a book about a yucky girl.

11.45am

Out running and I’m nearing the top of a hill as two young women come walking down and one raises her arm to offer me a triumphal fist pump and a whoop and I'm not sure if it’s because my expression suggests pain and near-death exertion or maybe she's just got Olympic fever, but I take the medal and smile warmly and hope the smile says to her, cannot begin to tell you how glad I am to be running properly again.

12.15pm

Andre Brett writes,

Deeply weird how so many people think public transport is useless if it can't cater for ALL journeys, ignoring that its effectiveness lies in catering for MANY so that those requiring private vehicles aren't stuck in traffic.

And he's referring to this:

So much intransigence, so much obstinacy, so much bloody mindedness.

So frustrating how unyielding people can be, how incapable of imagining that things could be different and better.

Meanwhile, in London, they’re using their imagination: 

Fiona Campbell @FionaBike

“research for Transport for London found that up to 14% of small van journeys could be made with bikes instead, particularly in congested parts of the city”

APPGCW @allpartycycling

Window cleaners, milk deliverers, beer purveyors, plumbers and DJs are all getting on their bikes as UK government incentives and new infrastructure kick off a two- and three-wheel revolution. https://t.co/14Dl009RGN

And finally in today’s roundup of transport of the future for a non-cooked atmosphere check out this De Walt coolness.

Dan Sturges @DNAsturges

@asymco To your point

2.35pm

I’m a bit shit at keeping up with the Olympics so I had to get the news from Google but good on you Erika! Nothing wrong with that, against the fastest in the world. Fist pump and a whoop.

3.05pm

A few Sunday columns ago I mentioned the most excellent Jimmy McGover prison drama Time and people said Dave where the hell is it I don’t have Time lol and so on. Good news!  It’s now on Neon.

In other TV news, we’ve been watching Ted Lasso, and it walks a precarious line between warm and decent and just-a-bit-way-too-much but damned if it doesn't work.

And when a character is being unfailingly, unbelievably, warm and decent and everyone is saying I love this show, that probably tells you all you need to know about the state of things right now.

4.20pm